Never, Ever Land

Karl Rove’s role in the U.S. Attorneys scandal

“I would never, ever make a change in a United States Attorney position for political reasons, or if it would in any way jeopardize an ongoing serious investigation,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18th. “I just would not do it.”

No one who has been paying attention to the troubles of the present Administration should have been surprised by what followed: two months of mounting revelations about the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys, for mostly political reasons. By last week, the revelations—along with the denials, the obfuscations, and the selective document dumps they provoked—had become a full-blown scandal. On Tuesday, the White House said that it would allow congressional committees to conduct “interviews” with Karl Rove, the President’s senior political adviser, and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, but the sessions would be behind closed doors and not under oath, with no transcripts. The offer was declined, and that afternoon President Bush, in his most petulant self-dramatizing mode, declared, from the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, that it was all right for Gonzales to appear before Congress, but that having his aides testify would be tantamount to holding “show trials” under “klieg lights.” Thus challenged, committees in the House and the Senate authorized subpoenas for top White House and Justice Department officials.

The President has the right to hire U.S. Attorneys with like-minded political leanings. The prosecutors are political appointees and, as such, are often replaced at the start of a President’s term. What’s unusual is to fire them in the middle of their own four-year terms. Assembling a compatible legal team is one thing; expecting its members to tailor individual investigations to partisan demands is another. The firings are symptomatic of how the Administration’s zeal for political loyalty and its intolerance of independent thinking result in chaos.

Gonzales defensively claimed in a press conference on March 13th that he had nothing to do with the dismissals, but he implied that the prosecutors were weak performers, thus inflaming those among them who had recently been commended for doing a splendid job. Subordinates were blamed for handling the matter poorly: Miers, who had initially proposed replacing all ninety-three U.S. Attorneys; and D. Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’s chief of staff, who abruptly resigned, ostensibly because he had not made Justice officials aware of just how closely he had worked with the White House to refine Miers’s idea.

But Sampson’s e-mails reveal him to be a loyal aide, intent on pleasing his superiors. Noting in January, 2005, that “it would be weird to ask” the prosecutors “to leave before completing at least a 4-year term,” and that some home-state senators would resist the move, he concluded, “That said, if Karl thinks there would be political will to do it, then so do I.” Two months later, Sampson sent Miers a list ranking all the federal prosecutors. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was reportedly in a group deemed to “have not distinguished themselves.” At the time, he was investigating the roles of Rove and Scooter Libby, then Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff, in the Valerie Plame case.

The list of targeted prosecutors changed several times as various interested parties became involved, but it was finally approved by the White House. On November 15, 2006, Sampson issued a five-step plan for how the firings were to be carried out. Step 3, “Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval,” provided responses to anticipated questions from soon-to-be-indignant prosecutors. (“Why me? The Administration is grateful for your service, but wants to give someone else the chance to serve in your district.”) On December 19th, Sampson wrote an e-mail to a White House aide about replacing the respected Bud Cummins, the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, with Timothy Griffin, a former opposition researcher for the Republican Party and an aide to Rove, who had relatively little prosecutorial experience. (Cummins, who had been asked to resign months earlier, finally did so the following day.) The cynicism and shortsightedness of all this was made explicit when, in the e-mail, Sampson speculated whether Griffin’s case was the best one with which to “test drive” a provision that had been quietly inserted into the renewed Patriot Act, making it possible to bypass the Senate confirmation process. But “if we don’t ever exercise it then what’s the point of having it?” he wrote. “All of this should be done in ‘good faith,’ of course.” Last week, the Senate, belatedly objecting to the sneak attack on its authority, voted to revoke the provision.

Karl Rove has been frank about using every available tool—most important, the war on terror—to establish Bush’s Presidential legacy, and about his master plan to entrench Republicans in state and national office. A key component of that plan was to insure Republican victories in close elections. As Justice Department e-mails reveal, the Administration focussed on voter fraud and immigration as two areas where Democrats could be vulnerable, and prosecutors were expected to do their part.

The example of former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, of New Mexico—one of the dismissed prosecutors—is particularly telling. In 2004, Iglesias developed a task force to investigate voter fraud. It looked into a hundred allegations, but ultimately did not find any cases worth prosecuting. Angered by the claim that he was asked to leave because he wasn’t up to the job, Iglesias wrote in a Times Op-Ed piece last week that he had conducted the most prominent political-corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history and had a record number of prosecutions and a conviction rate of ninety-five per cent. Nevertheless, Pete Domenici, New Mexico’s Republican senator, repeatedly called the Attorney General’s office to complain about him. Last October, Iglesias says, Domenici called him at home, to ask whether he was going to file indictments before the November elections in any of the corruption cases he was looking into that involved local Democrats. Several weeks later, at a White House holiday party, New Mexico’s state Republican Party chairman, Allen Weh, mentioned Iglesias to Rove, and, according to Weh, Rove said, “He’s gone.” Iglesias was told to resign, along with Daniel Bogden, Paul Charlton, Carol Lam, John McKay, Margaret Chiara, and Kevin Ryan, on December 7, 2006.

Almost four years ago, Karl Rove was asked, in a Profile for this magazine by Nicholas Lemann, whether it was possible to kill the Democratic Party. “I don’t think you ever kill any political party,” Rove replied. “But do you weaken a political party, either by turning what they see as assets into liabilities, and/or by taking issues they consider to be theirs, and raiding them? Absolutely!” Bush’s Presidency has been defined by the war on terror, but not in the ways that Rove intended: nonexistent W.M.D.s, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Gonzales’s acquiescence in memos condoning forms of interrogation outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. Today, Gonzales has the support of few Republicans except the President. Rove, who once boasted of a permanent Republican majority, is facing a subpoena from a Democratic Congress. The Bush Administration is struggling to regain the trust of the American public and to avoid a constitutional showdown over executive power—something it never, ever expected. ♦

Dorothy Wickenden has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996.